Directed Self-Assembly Accomplished with Magnets

As chips shrink ever smaller, traditional lithography techniques have begun to lose their ability to remain accurate and the hopes of maintaining Moore’s Law have dimmed as a result. But directed self-assembly, a way to build integrated circuits from the bottom up, has been held out as a possible way to keep shrinking chip feature sizes and and sustain Moore’s Law.

Basically, directed self-assembly is a way of exploiting the ability of molecules to arrange themselves into ordered structures—with a little direction from our end. Previously, H.-S. Philip Wong used lithography to carve indentations that served as a template for the molecules to self-assemble themselves. This combination of traditional lithography with self-assembly techniques has been a line of research that has seemed to be the most promising in the field. [read more..]